52Hz: The Whale and The Lighthouse

Position - Creative Lead, Character Artist and Animator, Effects Artist

Platform - iOS

Release - 2015

52Hz: The Whale and The Lighthouse was all about achieving a certain mood. I was was influenced mostly by anime like Fooly Cooly, Gurren Lagann, and Evangelion. FLCL was my primary inspiration for the somber and angsty tone of 52Hz while Gurren Lagann and Evangelion were more visual inspirations, things like eyes on the whales, the explosion visual effects, and even a bit in the character designs.

While working on 52Hz, I picked up the animation program Spine and used it for pretty much all of the animations in the game. This decision was made for two reasons. First, it meant that animation would take up WAY less space which we really needed for the mobile platform and secondly, interpolated animation looked much better and it made it so much easier to iterate. This being said, Spine allowed me to not be stuck strictly on interpolation. Mixing frame by frame animation with interpolated animation, like I did with the explosion effects, leads to some really awesome and quick results.